Worrying posts about Monzo freezing accounts

Monzo Chat
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Just been reading through the moneysavingexpert forums and saw two separate posts where people are saying their Monzo accounts have been frozen. They have no access to their money, given no reason why this has happened and not been told if and when they will get their money back.

If this ever happened to me I’d be screwed. How are the people with frozen accounts expected to pay their bills and buy food? What happens to their credit score when direct debits etc are refused?

Obviously I’m talking about the false positives here and not when accounts are being used unlawfully.

Very concerning.

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Just looked at Monzo’s Facebook page and checked out the most recent comments. If I was slightly concerned before I’m now very concerned.

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Monzo is a regulated bank, exactly the same as any high street bank. You shouldn’t have any higher risk of having your account closed with Monzo compared to anywhere else.

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Hi, yeah this is more to do with those innocent people ( false positives) who have had their accounts locked rather than the reasons why accounts are frozen.

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Indeed that should be the case.

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It’s the same people kicking up a stink on every social media medium.

All banks freeze accounts have a look on trust pilot for every bank and filter the reviews by 1 star.

But I suspect that digital only banks may have a higher rate beacuse they’ve made it so easy to open an account from your home that it’s criminals choice of bank

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When an account gets frozen it’s because of an anomaly , then they may have an explanation to that so their account can get unblocked, I’d say it’s rarely a ‘false positive’

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Google any Bank name + account frozen and you’ll find the same thing. I’m sure a tiny handful are false positives, most will be unusual activity, many will be mules unaware of what they’ve done and some will be people who have knowingly done something wrong. At the end of the day Monzo have an obligation to act when an account is suspect to fraud, money laundering etc. as all banks do.

A lot of the public outrage comes with the lack of communication - which is also not allowed by law until after an investigation.

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I’d been a long time Monzo customer and I’d like to think that I managed my account lawfully.

Maybe my day to day dealings deemed high risk by Monzo that’s why they closed my account, one can only speculate. When they did it, I had just £ 2.11 on my account, and luckily my fund was mostly on my Revolut account, so I wasn’t affected.

I’d suggest you to split your money into multiple accounts.

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So what happens when it’s a false positive ? Does monzo tell the customer this? Is the customer able to have their account back? Or are they left without an account & funds for up to 6 weeks?

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I suggest you convert all your money to gold bullion and store it off the coast. It’s the only way to be certain.

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They do, at least this is what my colleague got, but I wasn’t so lucky.

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I have transferred over thousands to and from Monzo, from various accounts and received from various sources over the last 3 years (generally it is when I’m moving my savings about). Monzo have not blocked my account because I am using it lawfully. I have not received anything from suspicious sources or committed fraud with it. Some people have had hundreds of thousands from house sales transferred without issue too. Every bank has to close accounts due to suspicious transactions.

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Interesting, did you ever challenge it? It’s good to still see you as part of the monzo community even though they closed your account.

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As others have said, the risk of this happening is no greater than with any other bank. The killer issue is how long Monzo can take to get back to you through customer support. Often this is significantly worse than other banks.

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@tbutz you’d be a fool to invest in gold bullion. MSCI world share index outperforms bullion consistently.

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Challenge it as in? Ask them to reconsider? I did once or twice I believe, but they seem to just copy and paste the same response over and over again, even 95% of the time I was asking about something else. I’m not sure how they came to the decision, again, one can only speculate, it would be nice if they actually ask to see proof of income or something. (I know they don’t need to!)

In regard to the link in the second post, it’s a bit misleading, somehow, it says “what you can do”, the short/long answer is nothing.

They sent me my DSAR, and I’m currently looking to see if I can get any advice from a “professional” or not. And then maybe escalate this to the Financial Ombudsman, eventually.

My main take away is, Monzo is a bank (business), not your friend after all, even they seem so nice on the surface/social media, so is other company. There will always be fans or haters.

I’m not angry with them closing my account, ‘cause it basically didn’t affect me much. I am very disappointed that, they didn’t make the whole process better. Too many unanswered questions, but the same old answer;

I mean I don’t need the above “information”, I want to know about something else i.e. the password to decrypt my DSAR documents.

If I vent it all out on Trustpilot, would anyone believe me? No, I’ll probably look like another troll. So might as well stay here, I’m a big fan of FinTech, I can still learn a lot from others as well.

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So bad, I tell you.

I’ve filed a complaint with the ICO after their live chat agent advised me to. It was basically regarding the matter below, I still don’t have access to my DSAR as of today.

They replied to my email but with the same response as given in my previous reply. I don’t know what to do now other than waiting for my case to be picked up by the ICO.

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Oh I’ve been looking to buy some on Freetrade for some time now.

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